i wrote yesterday’s post before we went out to trick or treat, so i didn’t have photos yet. but i do now!
baby pizza slice! it’s just a big piece of tan felt with the top folded down to create the illusion of crust. jared sewed yellow felt on top to represent cheese & cut a bunch of circles out of red felt to represent pepperoni (or “tomatoes,” as ramona calls them, even though she eats actual tomatoes all the time & must realize pepperoni is very different). i told him i had spray adhesive, but he insisted on sewing everything.
daddy & baby pizza slices! i’m kind of bummed i didn’t get a better shot of jared. he has total “dad face” in this photo (his term). people were so excited about these costumes! so many kids saw them & were like, “PIZZA!” they generated a lot more enthusiasm than i expected.
in lawrence, the businesses downtown host trick or treating & hand out candy for a few hours on halloween, & it’s like a costume parade for little kids. some folks have clearly put so much thought, time, energy, & even money into their costumes. “star wars”-themed costumes were far & away the most popular this year. we saw lots of little yodas, ewoks, storm troopers, & more than a few all-family costumes. there were a lot fewer elsas this year (from “frozen”), but she was still the #1 princess costume. one of my favorite costumes was a kid in a full-body cardboard space shuttle construction. there was also a teeny tiny baby in a lion costume, & his dad was in the most elaborate lion tamer costume. that was pretty great too.
jared observed that there were not many teenage mutant ninja turtle costumes this year. “i was worried about that,” he said, which made me laugh.
& here’s me in my rat costume. most people assumed i was just a regular everyday mouse, but one group of middle-aged drunk people sitting on a restaurant patio were like, “PIZZA RAT! are you pizza rat? it’s pizza rat!” & a second group of middle-aged drunk people actually took a picture of me & ramona holding hands.
i washed my hair after i made my headband & discovered that my hair, once clean, was too smooth & sleek for the headband! it kept sliding down & my ears would flop. i would have just taken it off, but i had drawn a nose & whiskers on my face & felt like i really needed the ears in order to not look insane.
pizza rat on the attack! i really wish jared had zoomed in & made us bigger in the frame, but i guess that’s what i get for dating a historian instead of a professional photographer. this entire blog is a testament to the fact that i am not a great photographer myself.
ramona was completely baffled by halloween. she’s a pretty shy kid & wasn’t comfortable saying “trick or treat” or “thank you” to strangers, even though she talks non-stop when she’s just with me & jared. she talks so much that she doesn’t let us talk to each other. if we’re conversing about something & she’s in the room, she yells over us & demands that we talk to her instead. i don’t love this, but…threenagers.
she really liked the fact that people were giving her candy, but she didn’t seem to understand why they were giving her candy, & she was completely flummoxed by all the other kids in their costumes. we let her eat some treats while we walked & she got very sticky. after about four blocks, she took off her costume & laid down on the sidewalk. we steered her into the used bookstore & chilled out for a while. then we went home & had dinner. so she didn’t get a big haul of treats, but at this age, i don’t think treats are the point. i mean, we don’t really let her eat sugar anyway, & if we want candy, we’ll just go to the store & get some discount halloween-themed candy.
i also noticed yesterday that the neighbors behind our house were really on the ball with halloween. they put out a scarecrow with a jack o’ lantern head & had this whole elaborate ghosts-on-a-pulley-system thing happening. since we only live a block from downtown, no trick or treating really happens in the neighborhood. everyone just goes downtown to the shops! so these people were just doing it for fun & to amuse passers-by. they’re pretty young, probably in their 20s? & they seems so on top of their lives. they dry all their laundry on a clothesline, they have a yard sale every weekend, they’re always walking their dog & going kayaking on the kansas river. i mean, i have never talked to them. i just see them & think wistfully about how together they seem compared to what a hot mess i was in my 20s. or even in my 30s, if we’re being real. our only halloween decoration was a pumpkin with mud all over it (we couldn’t have rinsed it off at some point?), & some chomps taken out of it by ambitious local squirrels.
& last night was daylight saving time. this seems to be a detested time of year among my fellow parents. there’s a lot of talk about how it ruins their kids’ sleep & they get off-schedule for weeks. this is ramona’s third daylight saving fall-back, & it’s always been smooth sailing for us. we just stuck to the usual routine: dinner at 7pm, family tidying after, ramona gets a shower, ramona goes to bed, jared & ciara stay up late because woo! we partied hard by putting on our jammies & reading in bed.
she woke up at 7:30am, which was technically 8:30am, but she usually gets up at 7:30am, so win! no change to the schedule at all. maybe daylight saving time is harder if you have more than one kid? or maybe this is just a manifestation of ramona being a pretty chill kid. jared gets her up at 7:30am everyday so he can give her breakfast & get her dressed before he has to leave for school, but if left to her own devices, she would probably sleep later.
should i do bimble & pumple’s “sewvember” thing on instagram? i know some people hate “challenges” like that. i mean, hate seeing the posts in their feeds. personally, i think they can be kind of fun. now that i finally joined 2010, got a smartphone, & have instagram, maybe i will do it.
Seams Legit 
We didn’t even put out a pumpkin! I don’t know that I’ve ever decorated the outside of our house. I always put up decorations inside if we were having a party, but I didn’t bother this year.
Daylight Savings is probably a pain for anyone whose kids wakes up super early. If my kid got up at 6am, it would probably be a lot tougher. We usually have to drag her out of bed around 7am to get ready for daycare, so it’s not such a big deal for us. She sleeps in until maybe 8 on the weekends, so we got plenty of sleep out of her today. We kept her up stupid late on Halloween, so that seems to have reset her clock later. She went to bed just fine at her normal bedtime tonight.
i cursed myself writing that post. ramona woke up crazy early for the rest of the week. i think she’s finally back to normal now.
it wasn’t all bad because she’s been really weird about having breakfast in the morning, & all the coaxing & cajoling jared had to do to get her to sit down & eat was making him late for school. so having her get up early got him back on a good morning schedule. but we would all still prefer for her to sleep a little later in the morning!
we only put out a pumpkin because we took ramona to a pumpkin patch like the first weekend they were open for the season & bought one. squirrels instantly started nibbling on it & it is being whittled away, but we are celebrating decorative gourd season nonetheless!